THE RADIATION RANGERS
“I don’t think we’ve seen numbers that high but we’re not qualified to say if it’s natural or unnatural,” said one Pet-Chem employee who asked to remain anonymous. “That’s the hardest goddamn water in your life. It’s a little bizarre. I would hope not too many people would touch that water.”
‘Mass Hysteria’
The Radiation Rangers didn’t want to test this suspicious water themselves – that’s what they thought the government was for. Then, this spring, the group decided to ask the city to demand that KB Homes investigate the mystifying muck even though they had been derided in the Simi Valley Acorn by Councilmember Glen Becerra. “If something is wrong up there, then absolutely we’re going to get to the bottom of it, but if it turns out something is not wrong, then I don’t want to see a complete devaluation of homes just because a few neighbors created mass hysteria,” Becerra said April 30.
Becerra, whose wife Sally is a real estate agent for Troop Real Estate in Simi Valley, continued hammering the group at an April 23 city council meeting. “Several weeks ago in the Acorn, there was an article about our trip to Washington, D.C. and specifically the meeting we had with Senator Feinstein trying and asking her to facilitate getting EPA involved in the Runkle Canyon property. There were some comments in there I made about wanting to make sure we managed that issue responsibly, that we do it without creating hysteria,” Becerra said. “I stand by those comments.”
So it was with some reticence that Matheney, Serafine, and Southwick pleaded with the mayor and council members May 7 to come take a look at what was bubbling up in the hills above the city. “Nobody wants to run down property value, I mean, I’m sympathetic like everybody else but we cannot put the people in danger,” Matheney said during public comment at a city council meeting. “I’d be willing to go up. If you won’t pay for it, we will. I don’t know how much more fair we can get than that.”
“I happen to have been up there, also,” said Southwick. “There is some very nasty stuff up there.”
As the council members sat stone-faced, Serafine made a final pitch. “I’ve videotaped it if you don’t want to go up there. But I really think that it would be best for us to all go up, take a sample, give half of the sample to KB, let them go off and do their tests. We take our sample and we all go down to the post office to drop it off together. We all witness it went out to a lab that is transparent.”
Mayor Miller stirred to life. “This council really wants to know what’s going on up there so we can make arrangements to go up with you and we will do that,” said Miller, police chief of the city for 12 years before being elected mayor in 2006. “We have your phone numbers here and we’ll have the city staff get a hold of you and we’ll arrange a time to get together and we’ll go check it out and we can go from there.”
It was not to be. The city soon informed the Stop Runkledyne group that KB Homes had reminded them that they had already tested the surface water and had submitted that information in a comprehensive 42-page report that was already in the development’s EIR. That 2003 report by Huntington Beach-based Miller Brooks Environmental Inc. tested one asphalt sample and a nearby surface water sample.
In the body of the report, Miller Brooks writes that Title 22 metals were “below state and federal regulatory limits (see Table 1).” Title 22 metals are toxic metals listed in Title 22 of the state health code. But the report’s Table 1 actually says that the Title 22 metals in the surface water sample were “not analyzed.” Oddly, the Title 22 metals were tested in the asphalt but not in the water.
Really, Really Hot Property
The 2003 Miller Brooks report is the environmental report the city told CityBeat it used of all the reports on the project since 1999. It is also the same report that the California Department of Health Services (CDHS) called “not considered useful” when analyzing the strontium-90 in Runkle Canyon dust as we have already reported (“Dust in the Wind,” March 15, 2007).
CityBeat also reported that the citizens submitted a list of questions to the city which were forwarded to CDHS. Those questions were answered by the department on April 10 and contained some interesting omissions. Except for one soil sample slightly above background, CDHS wrote that there’s no evidence of elevated strontium-90 on the land between Runkle Canyon and Rocketdyne, the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. The implication was that if Brandeis-Bardin had little or no elevated Sr-90, and it’s closer to Rocketdyne, that Runkle Canyon’s high Sr-90 readings were suspicious.
CDHS states twice in its answers to citizens that there is only one sample known of elevated Sr-90 ever found on the Brandeis-Bardin property. Actually, there are 25 Brandeis-Bardin soil samples with elevated Sr-90 according to a Rocketdyne-funded study, the 535-page 1995 McLaren/Hart report, “Additional Soil and Water Sampling – The Brandeis-Bardin Institute and Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.” The report also noted two hot water samples with Sr-90 on the Jewish camp property.
Additionally, CDHS stated in their responses that in a November 8, 2006 CDHS analysis that the chance of dying from Runkle Canyon Sr-90 was 0.00045 in a million. That analysis seems flawed: DHS took the “risk-based” number of possible deaths, about 5 per million, converted it into a “dose-based” number and then back again to a risk-based result to come up with 0.00045 out of a million. This scientific slight of hand ends up with a result 10,774 times lower than what the department said the figure was to begin with.
